Chapter 15: What He Holds Against Her

Santo's POV

I had walked the flat until the floorboards answered me back.

At four in the morning I heard the street door, and I did not run down the stairs.

Gaspare had told me to let her come up on her own legs.

She came in with her mother's sewing box under one arm and a long dry cleaner's bag over the other.

She put them down on the table, and she looked at me.

"I'm not hurt," she said. "Nobody saw me. The head guard pretended to be asleep."

"Viola."

"Don't ask me anything yet. Look."

She unzipped the bag.

The coat inside was gray, and the left cuff was black from the hem to the elbow.

I had last seen that coat from under a cellar stair, with the firelight on it.

My legs went, and I sat down on the floor of the flat before I knew I was doing it.

She knelt in front of me and put her hand flat on the cuff.

"He kept it clean," she said. "In his study, in a bag, twenty-three years."

"I know the smell of that smoke," I said. "I did not think I would smell it again."

She did not say she was sorry, and I was grateful.

She put the letter in my hand instead, and she watched me read it twice.

By eight we were on the cliff behind the house, with the wind coming hard off the water.